Sunday, February 08, 2009

Getting involved with a newish project, Brix-CMS

Continuing my interest in all things Wicket, some months before Christmas I found an open source project called Brix CMS, currently hosted on Google Code. It seemed like a more agile fit for my needs regarding content driven websites, with high value placed on componentisation. Additionally the project owners are committers for Wicket, and have put a very well organised framework together in Brix, easily extensible, and very powerful.

I have bashed some sites together using Brix already for a range of clients for my company, and have been pleasantly surprised with how I have been able to apply the framework to so many different domains.

It is early days yet, but the discussion lists are picking up a little, and the roadmap looks promising. As a tool, it certainly fits my needs so I will be following it with great interest. Documentation is sparse but improving, and much of what you need to do to extend Brix is fairly intuitive.

Leveraging Wicket and Jackrabbit seems to provide such power and flexibility, I find it hard to go back to the ways of JSF or even worse Servlets and XSLT as some of my company's projects use. Cocoon with XSLT yes, Servlets with XSLT please no... no... no.

I am having a little difficulty getting my head around integration testing with Brix, the ability to test wicket pages in isolation is something I am missing, but hopefully I will find a way.